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Fig. 3

© Archiv Bundesstiftung Aufarbeitung

They claimed there were not only “shortcomings in the visible memorials to the Wall as a symbol of the history of the city, Germany and the world, but also in the comprehensive representation of the SED dictatorship in the areas of control, daily life and resistance.”¹⁹

In spring 2005, the Berlin House of Representatives organised a hearing to discuss “public engagement with the history of the capital city, Berlin-Wall memorials and the SED past”.

In light of the memorial site on Checkpoint Charlie (initiated by Alexandra Hildebrandt) and the public reaction to it, Berlin’s Minister of Culture, Thomas Flierl (PDS/Die Linke), had already begun to develop a concept for the design of a Wall memorial in summer 2004. On the one hand, the concept intended to secure and preserve any remains of the Wall still in the city as well as to protect from further development any sites where it was still possible to imagine the extent of the Wall and the death strip. On the other hand, any existing memorials should be made more visible and also refer to each other. There were already around 60 memorials which remembered escapees, or memorials made out of remains from the Wall, such as those located on Potsdamer Platz. Amongst these memorials was a double row of cobbled stones which had marked the path of the Wall since the start of the 1990s. However, recognising the stones was increasingly difficult as they were not used exclusively for marking the path of the Wall, but also for repairing damaged streets. There were no funds available to introduce a metal strip with the dates of the building and the collapse of the Wall, which had made mapping the path of the Wall possible.